South Road upgrades: Federal budget to give projects the green light

South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill is expecting there will be funds in next week's federal budget to upgrade both the Darlington and near-city sections of South Road in Adelaide.

The Federal and SA Governments previously clashed about which project should be done first, with the Federal Government favouring Darlington.

SA argued work was further progressed on the plan to upgrade South Road between Torrens Road and the River Torrens, which would ease congestion at Port and Grange Roads.

Mr Weatherill says he does not want to pre-empt the budget announcement but has hinted both upgrade projects will get the green light.

"All I can say is that this is what I predicted before the election, that after the state election all this nonsense about not being able to work with state Labor governments would disappear and commonsense would prevail and we'd be able to reach agreement to do both Torrens-to-Torrens and Darlington [sections] and I'm confident we'll get there," he said.

The Federal Government says it is committed to upgrading the entire length of South Road within a decade and has been telling people to wait for budget time for more details.

Federal Assistant Infrastructure Minister Jamie Briggs says the joint funding initiative should come as no great surprise to South Australians.

"I saw the Premier suggest that ... and I'm glad that after the Prime Minister said that in October, he's now with us on that," Mr Briggs said.

"The Prime Minister said in October we wanted to do both projects at the same time and I'm very hopeful that by the budget we'll be able to make announcements in that respect."

Previous work on South Road has included building an underpass at Anzac Highway and an elevated Superway in the northern suburbs of Adelaide.